D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

pemerton said:

I didn't say the first thing. And the first thing is a procedure, as described in the second sentence.

If the procedure permits the GM to just act as they fancy, though, then I think we've moved out sandbox territory and into a "living novel" approach.

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So if the GM makes a call without procedural restraints, it can't be a sandbox. According to you and, from the couple dozen articles and links I read not to mention every description of sandbox I've heard from anyone else, is something only you require.

pemerton said:

Here, the relevant constraint seems to be "what I know about the NPC". You haven't said where that comes from.

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In D&D I'm responsible for all of the fiction other than the PCs.

pemerton said:

In the classic D&D sandbox, if the NPC is a newly-introduced character (eg via a random encounter), then the first thing that the GM will know about the NPC is whatever it says about that sort of person in the Monster Manual; and the second thing will be the outcome of the reaction dice.

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That's not anything I've ever heard or seen done. The vast majority of NPCs I've ever encountered in D&D over decades were created by the DM not random table generation.

pemerton said:

I didn't say anything about your preference.

I responded to this thing that you posted: "As long as the GM is not forcing a direction I don't care if the location, obstacles or opportunities are predetermined, procedurally determined, made up on the spot. All that matters is the entertainment value". Now it turns out that your preference includes other things, like taking into consideration the world that has been envisioned.

I still can't tell whether or not you're advocating for "living novel", because you haven't said much about when and how the GM's envisioning of the world takes place. In my view, what characterises sandbox-y play is that the player can make choices about what is at stake for their PCs - information and context aren't always perfectly known, but aren't blind either. The GM taking into consideration the world that has been envisioned (by them) is consistent with both informed and blind choice on the player side.

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Sandboxes involve the players making decisions and declarations for their characters. Unless you're changing the default approach in D&D that means they make decisions based on what their characters know and their actions are limited to what their characters can do. As I would assume you well know. How those declarations are handled depend on the game and preference. I've never heard of the term "living novel".

hawkeyefan said:

What did you do for your last game?

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One of my players has been running the sessions on regular game day so I can playtest from the other side. And before that I was GMing modern horror to playtest something. And after that I was running some Chinese horror adventures (a couple of witch veered into sandbox but weren't proper sandboxes). But for the previous two sandboxes one the players decided they wanted to be bath bead merchants in Mai Cun, relatives of the Guan family. So we started there and eventually went on seek immortality. This is the most recent session of that campaign.

hawkeyefan said:

Yeah, for me, the idea that a sandbox is without limit just seems wrong. That's kind of where the metaphor came from... a contained space, but lots of freedom within that space.

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I wouldn't say no limits, but as boundless as feasible. And you can certainly have parameters. I just don't see any reason why it has to be limited to one area of the world or something. It is perfectly fine though to say "anywhere inside this area" if that is all the GM feels like managing. Again, I have always preferred Living Adventure. I came to sandbox from frustration with paths, and brought some of my own ideas. But my impression among the sandbox folk I know is it can really range, from a small area to a province, to an empire, to a part of the world, to a continent or multiple continents and even beyond into spiritual realms of existence. I think it largely is going to boil down to style. Because my games are so character driven, I can scale up pretty easily. For example in Ogre Gate, the heavily realms are more like divine sect headquarters, and what matters are the NPCs and the groups they belong to. If you have ever seen a Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain or Journey to the West, it can get a bit like that when you start dealing with higher levels of play.

hawkeyefan said:

Like for my Spire game, we didn't even use the entire city. There are about 12 to 15 districts in the city, and we started in one, spent about 75% if our time there, about 20% of time in a neighboring district, and then about 5% in a total of 4 other districts. Leaving the city was not really an option... that's not what the game is about. I don't think that restriction disqualifies the game from being a sandbox.

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Sure that if fine. I don't think that disqualifies it at all. My point was never you can't have a focused sandbox (I do think though the more focused the more qualifiers you might want to add: i.e. most players will expect to be able to leave a city so if it is essentially a city sandbox I would say that. And some people might debate whether a city can be a sandbox but I don't think it can't be. But when I have run city adventures the closest thing to that has probably been my Daolu or Dee scenarios. In those the players can always leave. And again, it is largely the factions that matter. I am not mapping out the city like it is a dungeon to explore. I have a large overview of it, I have basic information about places, groups, people, factions, politics, etc. But I try to have a city be a dynamic place.

hawkeyefan said:

I don't know. I look at Prospero's Dream, the space station sandbox from Mothership's "A Pound of Flesh" module and I see specific ways to do things. Travel from area to area on the station works per a specific map which is divided into areas, and it takes X amount of time to make your way through an area, and you check for encounters for each unit of time. It's a set thing. The rest of the book largely follows suit. Are there some areas where there are multiple approaches a GM could take? Sure. But it's not nothing but that.

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I haven't played that so I can't comment on it. I do know many people offer up much more procedurally driven sandboxes than I do, and they sometimes get more into the details of things like that (I have some friends who run sandboxes this way, because they like having things clearly laid out in that way). I just don't run them that way. I use tools and apply them to what the players are trying to do. I have tendencies and standby techniques, procedures and mechanics, but I am pretty open to adjusting to fit what players want.

hawkeyefan said:

I didn't see any examples you may have posted in the Good Sandbox thread... I haven't really been following that one.

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I have a post about Wuxia Sandboxes on my blog. It might not be detailed like you want because I genuinely just don't think the way you and @Manbearcat do about games I think. But if you take a look it might shed light. I also posted a link to my War of Swarming Beggars adventure. This was an adventure I didn't end up publishing so I put on the blog. As a result it is a bit incomplete. But it is meant as a kind of sect war living adventure. You can see it HERE. And it is the predecessor to my Sons of Lady 87 campaign book (which refines some of the sect war management tools). And HERE is the post where I put up the encounter and travel rules from my rulebook.

hawkeyefan said:

But I do think that this lack of specificity in process is a bit why the term sandbox isn't always understood. It seems it could mean a lot of things.

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That might be, but I think the trade off is the open and organic style I would point to. You do have people doing sandbox stuff that is very, very specific. That is perfectly fine and a great way to learn sandbox if anyone is having trouble. For me I find I bounce off those approaches

hawkeyefan said:

Sure... like I said, it's not a certainty. It can be avoided. But I think there's a tension between GM prep and player-driven play that every GM should be aware of, and should consider.

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I don't see this. I understand why it might seem true, because the more the GM fleshes out and defines the world, the less power the players have to define it...e.g., if the GM decided there are no barbarian clans, that restricts my options.

But meaningful play requires restrictions. Choosing Forgotten Realms as the setting means no laser guns, and that technically restricts player choice, but doing so is necessary for consistency.

Player driven play, imo, is not about the players having more power to define the world, but about the characters having meaningful choices. And that requires structure, that requires the DM to prepare things.

hawkeyefan said:

Well in my case, the players all know each other already, so that's not an issue.

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My bad; I meant characters. And while we may do group creation (or not; some players jump the gun), that doesn't mean the characters actually know each other.

hawkeyefan said:

I've been both GM and player in cases where this happened. I had prepped a frankly ridiculous amount of material to start a campaign and I expected it to work very well and it was for my longtime group and I talked it out with everyone ahead of time (individually, mostly... we didn't have like a forma session zero) and yet once we began playing, one player just couldn't get interested in what I'd prepared.

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OK, but that's one player out of how many? Were the rest of them "meh" about the prep, or did they really like it? Does that one player often dislike things?

hawkeyefan said:

I'm not talking about assigning homework. I'm talking about working together before play begins. Like one session, maybe? A half session may do. Depends on how long a group typically plays.

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Neither am I. But I have a couple of players who are always on their computers and thus always have our discord chat open, and when they get a world-building idea in their head they won't stop. And I have a couple of players who aren't habitually on discord. And one player that, even when we do worldbuilding right before a game, tends to zone out.

hawkeyefan said:

That's possible. I don't think the volume of material is what makes a setting deep. The Forgotten Realms is pretty absurd... and I don't just mean because of dragons and goblins and such.

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It depends on what those volumes of material are about. Festivals, foods, social events, myths and legends, things like that--they all help to bring a setting to life. And some players love these things and others don't care either way, and probably still others hate them.

hawkeyefan said:

I don't really think it's a whole lot more focused than D&D. I mean, "criminals" is a pretty broad descriptor. So is "adventurer".

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I feel it is. For example, if I wanted to play as a law-abiding citizen of Duskvol who worked for the government and went out into the wilds in order to fight demons or whatever before they could enter the city, I couldn't do it with BitD. At least not without some heavy modifications. Because while you have free reign as to what sort of criminal you can be and where in the city you do your crimes, BitD isn't about playing a law-abiding employee of the government, wandering outside of Duskvol's walls, or professional demon-hunting.

hawkeyefan said:

Right but you asked me what sort of games I might play where random is the same as plotted, so I provided an example.

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You kind of didn't? Unless you meant that in AW/BitD, random is the same as plotted in terms of railroad, in which case I think I'd have to disagree. Or you did and I completely misunderstood you.

hawkeyefan said:

I don't think preparation is going to prevent railroading. Quite the opposite, really... though I don't think it's a certainty or anything like that.

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I think that it 100% depends on what the GM is prepping for. If the GM preps a story, there's a far stronger chance that there's going to be railroading than if they prepped events or encounters. Especially if the events or encounters are triggered by the PCs going to a certain location or if a certain types of rolls are made (random encounter checks, rolling X number of failed Survival rolls, etc.). But if the GM is prepping a story, they're probably not running a sandbox.

hawkeyefan said:

But I think there's an inherent tension between large amounts of preparation by the GM and player-driven play. It's kind of definitional, isn't it? It's not insurmountable, but it exists and I think needs to be addressed to make functional player-driven play. Not being aware of it is the reason that I've seen people describe something as a sandbox, but really it was just a whole bunch of GM generated plot presented in a slightly different way.

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I can't say as I've really seen that tension.

pemerton said:

If the procedure permits the GM to just act as they fancy, though, then I think we've moved out sandbox territory and into a "living novel" approach.

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regardless of the results the GM arrives at and how much player input they incorporate?

So unless there is a prescriptive procedure that the DM has to follow, it would not be a sandbox, regardless of whether what the GM arrives at could be an outcome of that procedure or even be better (more interesting and incorporating more player input) than what the procedure would arrive at?

Bedrockgames said:

I am not a fan of it myself but from RPG Geek:

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Well, clearly they agree with me. They used the same word.

Micah Sweet said:

Well, clearly they agree with me. They used the same word.

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If you google it you will probably find more involved discussions around the term

Lanefan said:

If so, then how-why was I hearing people talk about sandbox-style play - and using that term for it - in the 1980s?

I suppose it's possible someone local came up with the term independently, though I'd count that as unlikely.

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Every magazine I have from back in the day used sandboxes as a synonym for setting or campaign, not as a label for a type of campaign.

Do the search I suggest here on the Enworld forum, and you can see the transition from 2002 to 2010.

I wrote about this back in 2010



This was quoted in a forum post thread in 2022

hawkeyefan said:

No one preps stuff that they think is going to be boring. Few people set out to deny player choice or meaningful decision points for them. Those are just things that wind up sometimes getting sacrificed in the name of some other priority... most of which involves prep, in my experience.

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I'm going to suggest sometimes people, in practice, do set out to deny player choice under some circumstances; you can argue its for another priority, but they know its outright necessary to avoid some problems. This is usually a consequence of having some players that some of the time are not so much on the same page with others (and no, before someone breaks in, sometimes that can't be easily avoided given specifics of local conditions) and allowed to pursue their personal choices will end up dragging the game off in directions no one else wants to go (and sometimes even just letting them do their own thing won't prevent it--the well known example is characters picking fights that causes big problems that other players may not want to deal with and can't easily disengage with once its happened, since the people they've picked the fight with know about the association between the characters).